When economic, social, health and environmental imperatives jostle for top spot in virtue, how can they be ranked? Some have recently advocated the return of face-mask mandates. “We can certainly stop it making as many mutations by stopping it infecting as many people – if we block its transmission, if we wear a mask, if we get vaccinated, if we do social distancing,” a health expert said. But is it without cost? “Buy a mask and let his family go hungry, or buy food and go out into the crowded city without one – that is the stark choice facing Hayatullah Khan, an Afghan labourer whose daily earnings have fallen below $1.50 during the coronavirus pandemic,” one journalist observed about poor countries. Yet for some there are no resource conflicts: tax the billionaires and give Hayatullah Khan a free mask, free food, or, preferably, both. Welcome to Woke economics, where payments are made in intentions and virtue pays for everything.
Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺
An apology… pic.twitter.com/6Yo9K5oGXq— James Melville (@JamesMelville) August 24, 2023
Even when Woke mandates go wrong they can say: we meant well. But once there is more than one concurrent Woke existential crisis, they must compete for scarce resources with each other because the Unlimited Stash assumption is false. The Unlimited Stash assumption is the theory that the world can be remade and wealth redistributed without limit because billionaire tax revenue and the hoarded riches of the privilege are endless. Moreover, productivity is invariant with respect to competence, merely a construct.
Unfortunately billionaire tax revenues are not endless, productivity is not independent of skill, and wealth is not infinite. In the psychology of Woke economics, scarcity does not exist except as the byproduct of greedy theft perpetrated by billionaires. Some think, for example, that unlimited food can be “bought from the store” even as farming is banned for its carbon emissions. That shops can be opened and closed like Christmas blinker lights. Others think electric cars can all be powered from the plug without considering how the generation plants themselves will be fueled.
These are minor details if will and mandates suffice to bring resources into existence; if when a cause was important enough, unlimited money can be found in the Stash to redress it; if saying “the world will end if you don’t do this” were all it took. By invoking the precautionary principle masks can be required, gas stoves are banned, children chemically altered. When good intentions are both sufficient and necessary, it’s a world without normal economic costs.
But thinking doesn’t make it so. Sooner or later the resource competition forces the progressives to face the Woke problem of evil. Eventually it dawns on all that nothing is free. Wind farms kill birds, batteries are made with rare minerals mined with African child labor, avocados must be flown by air to First World tables, etc. The progressive reaction to these realizations is rage. Rage! Immense anger that the capitalism has forced these cruel choices upon the pure of heart. It creates a truly theological dilemma. How can a just movement, consisting exclusively of all-loving pronouns motivated by effective altruism, be the cause of evil? Can that dark shadow at the end of the hall that appears briefly when we switch off the light be us?
The most far-seeing progressives accept the existence of moral and economic costs and simply justify them by invoking the ultimate result. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” was the way 20th century ideologues put it. Never mind the broken eggs if the result was the workers’ paradise, world peace, the planet saved. Woke activism is governed by the economics of the incommensurable. It’s a bazaar where religious goods are exchanged at monstrously high human prices and no one is able to say if the sale was fair. In that bazaar, supermarket rules do not apply.
Was shutting down the world worth saving it from Covid? Should 1.3 million cattle be culled in Ireland to reach anticipated government targets for reducing greenhouse gases? In a world where money loses meaning because of an inexhaustible stash and government spending the answer will be determined by politics. It is the ultimate irony that a market in virtue is controlled by the side with the bigger megaphone and the more plentiful ammunition. Vice adjudicates the economy of virtue. Never mind if it doesn’t make sense. We meant well.
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